“Slide your feet up the street, bend your back/ Shift your arm, then you pull it back/ Life is hard, you know (oh whey oh) So strike a pose on a Cadillac.” sing the Bangles in their hit, Walk like an Egyptian. I bring you good news from this crazy life! Like Sherman marched through Georgia, or Christ on a stallion, I have blazed through the first seven shifts of Restaurant Week and am now hotstepping like a pharaoh to the sea of the Weekend and the promise of an Afternoon Off. Only three more shifts and I have the entire afternoon and evening off. The week is beginning to climax, as in many lines of dominos converging on a central Artery.
But like Morpheus in Reloaded I have planted in the past a sword for myself to wield against my future foes. People say I’m crazy, doing what I’m doing, and give me all kinds of warnings to save me from ruin, but in effect, I’m okay. I know how to play the game but I’m lazy, dreaming my life away. I’m doing fine watching shadows on the wall, but sitting here making the wheels go ’round and ’round, I feel not like I’m off the ball, but that I can be the ball. No problem, the solution to the maze of Restaurant Week is time, which acts like gravity on a marble through many traps and switchbacks, and that marble is me. I love to watch myself roll, hit walls, and fall fall fall… Today I served a 95 year old woman and I just wanted to say, its free. I got emotional for a second when I told her to enjoy the rest of her day. Reminds me of the Talib Kweli line… “For eyes that won’t see another year… it’s another day.”
But who knows how long that woman will live. I have many questions, as children often do, but one observation I am quite sure of is that we people are tough, resilient survivors. Comets from the sky don’t even scare me, nor do terrorists, tsunamis, weapons, realpolitick, the streets, colored… the one fear that remains in my mind is the absence of people.
Recurring people make me happy. For example, Tuesday night after eating a delivered club sandwich, I went out to Harvard Sq. the Charles Hotel (making lots of money can be so sweet). At around 2:30 AM I was finishing up a beer and talking to this guy I’d just met about the averted closing of CBGB’s and our mutual insane friend, Monoman. We said goodbye eventually, and I took a cab home. The cabdriver just happened to be the very same man that took me home the last time I went out to the Charles Hotel, the cabbie who saved my cellphone for me because I left it in his cab that night, and drove it over to the Hess Station for me the next day. Today at the East Coast Grill I served the girl who served me drinks last night at Charlies Kitchen. As John Lennon observed, watching the wheels, Instant Karma.